Session report: Hanging Gardens, Chariots

[Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe@...>]

Had a lot of fun playing two piecepack games last night.  I hope James
and Mark will take any criticisms of their games as being intended in
a helpful spirit.  I would play either of these games again, even if
they were not changed.

Ron

----

Hanging Gardens

I played a game of Hanging Gardens (by James Kyle) last night at
Seattle Cosmic Game Night with my friends John Braley and Chad Urso
McDaniel.  It was the second or third time I had played it, but the
first time for John and Chad.  All three of us enjoyed the game a
great deal, but agreed that the sight line rules still need
clarification.

John compared Hanging Gardens to Alien City, which is high praise from
him.  He likened the early portion of Hanging Gardens to the initial
period before the board "crystallises" in Alien City, while players
are still unsure who will benefit from the placement of the pieces.

Chad remarked that one important tactic in HG is to spoil the colour
symmetry in rows with which your gazebo (pawn) is not aligned.  The
colour symmetry rules reminded me of the game Entropy <FIXME>, with
each player playing both Chaos and Order at the same time, for
different rows of coins.  However, I thought (and Chad and John
agreed) that it was a little too easy to spoil the symmetry of a row
in which you have no interest.  In Entropy, Order gets points for any
symmetrical subgroup of the group in question.  In Hanging Gardens, on
the other hand, you are forced to count every flower bed you can see
in a row.  Symmetrical subgroups don't count; if the group in your
field of vision is not symmetrical _as a whole_, you score _nothing_
for symmetry.  This makes symmetry very fragile and hard to obtain;
the seven-coin group GGRBRGB would score seven symmetry points, except
that the two end flower beds don't match.  It would be nice if
symmetry were a little more robust and played a larger part in the
game; at the moment, you have very little ability to block someone
from breaking the symmetry of one of "your" rows.

There's also a weird Icehouse thing going on wherein string, dental
floss, and laser pointers may be needed to determine whether a gazebo
can "really" see a flower bed.  The present "debatable bed visibility"
calculation ("A particular bed is obscured by a plateau unless its
distance from the plateau is equal or greater than the following: the
product of the bed's distance from the gazebo multiplied by the
plateau's height all divided by the gazebo's height. Ignore any
remainder.") doesn't help much, in our experience.  Our scoring ended
up being fairly rough and ready, and we had to calculate some scores
several times before we were all satisfied.

Other comments: 

1. Chad and John tied, and we thought the game needed a tiebreaker
   rule.

2. Question: Does one coin alone directly on the sight line count for
   two points?  (One point for colour, one point for symmetry.)  We ruled
   that it did.

I was considered a threat early in the game.  Chad said, "Ron's the
enemy!"  and I remarked that it was _nice_ to be the enemy for once.
However, John and Chad both caught on that all else being equal, you
should move your gazebo as far back and as high up on the board as you
can, so that it can see as many coins as possible.  Seen from this
angle, as it were, the game becomes a race to grab a good position and
hold it.  Again, the game would be more interesting if some of the
other tactics were strengthened, such as the symmetry rules.
Fortunately, this is only version 0.2b of the ruleset, so it seems
James intends to improve the game.

Still, Hanging Gardens is worth playing as-is.  If you like the
commercial games Entropy, Torres, Icehouse, or Pueblo, or the
piecepack game Alien City, chances are good you will like Hanging
Gardens a great deal.

Final scores

Chad: 19
John: 18
Ron: 13

John won a metal "Flapdoodle" optical illusion puzzle, and Chad selected
an MS-Windows PC game CD from the Seattle Cosmic Prize Bag.

----

Chariots

The second piecepack game of the evening was Chariots by Mark Biggar.
I played it with John Braley and Dave Howell.  Dave immediately
recognised the "impulse" movement system of Chariots as being similar
to Car Wars, although (he said) the order in which players moved was
closer to Ben Hvrt (another chariot race from Cheapass Games).  Since
Dave had played this kind of game before, while John and I hadn't,
Dave acted as a sort of gamemaster, counting out the impulses and
stating who had to move next.

As in a lot of race games (including Backgammon), there is a fair
amount of blocking.  My strategy was to play high numbers in the
corners, even at the risk of crashing, and hope that by going around
the outside of the track as quickly as possible, rather than slowly
around the inside, I could catch up.  Although I never crashed, my
strategy failed; I came in third of three (but only by one space).
Dave and John adopted more conventional "blocking game" rather than
"running game" strategies and stuck to the inside of the track.  We
were all neck and neck until Dave pulled ahead on the first curve in
the second lap, and slowly increased his lead from then on.  At the
end of the game, Dave was five or six spaces ahead, and I was one
space behind John.

John probably would have done a little better but had several lousy
die rolls.  He thought that dice played too large a part in the game
and came up with a splendid suggestion for a new piecepack component:
piecepack dice cards, along the lines of the Deck of Dice <FIXME>.
Seattle Cosmic uses these frequently for Settlers of Catan, and they
reduce hurt feelings over bad die rolls considerably.  (More on this
and similar ideas later.)

One problem we had while playing Chariots, although we had fun, was
that it was hard to discern certain features of the board, such as the
finish line, and especially where the insides and outsides of the
turns were.  Dave said this was a problem that came from playing with
a generic game system, and that if he played it again, he would make
his own board with these features clearly marked.  I said that it is a
recent trend for piecepack rulesets to include printable playmats, and
that two letter-sized sheets placed under the board would be
sufficient.  John suggested that dry-erase markers could be used on
the wooden tiles to highlight the areas of the board, but you'll do
that to my piecepacks when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers,
etc.  By the way, this was the first time John and Dave had seen the
third-edition Mesomorph piecepacks, and John asked whether people
might lose an eye during flicking games when pieces shot off the table
because of the new super-slick coating.

Final standings:

Dave: win
John: place
Ron: show

Dave won a blue water bottle from the Seattle Cosmic Prize Bag.

-- 
    Ron Hale-Evans ... rwhe@... ... http://ron.ludism.org/
	 Center for Ludic Synergy, Seattle Cosmic Game Night,
Kennexions Glass Bead Game & Positive Revolution FAQ: http://www.ludism.org/